Baldwin of Ford
Baldwin entered the abbey of Ford,
a daughter-house of Waverley,
in 1169; in 1173 he was made abbot, and he held the abbacy until
1180 when he was elevated to the see of Worcester. Baldwin was archbishop
of Canterbury from 1184-90.
He was a swarthy man, with an honest, venerable
face, only moderately tall, of good physique and inclined to be
thin rather than corpulent. He was modest and sober, and of great
abstinence and self-control, so that very little criticism was ever
levelled against him. He was a man of few words, slow to anger,
temperate in all his feelings and emotions, swift to hear,
slow to speak, slow to wrath. He had studied human letters
from his early youth and had always seen himself as one of our Lords
servants. By the purity of his personal life he was an inspiration
to his people. Of his own free will he resigned the position of
archdeacon to which he had been promoted in the canonical hierarchy,
and steadfastly scorning the pomps and vanities in this world, with
saintly devotion he became a monk in the Cistercian Order. In this
way of life he had always been more of a monk than anything else,
and within a year he was elected abbot. A few more years passed
and he was promoted to bishop and then archbishop. He had been faithful
in small things: now he was given far-reaching authority. However,
as Cicero said: Nature has produced nothing which is wholly
perfect. When he was raised to great power he was unable to
cast off the gentle and innate kindliness which he had always shown
as a private individual. He sustained his people with his staff,
instead of castigating them with his stick, acting more like a mother
offering her breasts than a father wielding his rod, and he was
publicly criticised for his laxness. His kindness of heart made
him weak and ineffectual, and the Church lost all sense of discipline.
He was clearly a better monk than abbot, a better abbot than bishop
and a better bishop than archbishop. When Pope Urban wrote to him,
he addressed him as follows: Urban, bishop, servant of the
servants of God, sends his greetings to the most fervent monk, the
warm abbot, the lukewarm bishop, the negligent archbishop
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